Willes: Football family extends to all races

B.C. Lions #97 Brent Johnson and #96 Khalif Mitchell during practice for the West Division Champions in Vancouver November 23, 2011 ahead of the 2011 Grey Cup.Photo by
Les Bazso

VANCOUVER — B.C. Lions defensive end Brent Johnson went to a high school in Kingston, Ont., where there might have been 10 kids who, well, didn't look like Brent Johnson.

Former B.C. Lions linebacker Carl Kidd was born and raised in the deep south and, until he came to the CFL, his experience with white guys was limited.

Kidd attempted to rectify that situation with Johnson.

Given their histories, you can guess how his efforts went down.

“Carl would tell me he didn’t have an accent and I didn’t understand half the things he said for three years,” Johnson relates. “The best part was he thought I had this crazy accent.”

But in their six years together with the Lions, Brent Johnson from Kingston, Ont., and Carl Kidd from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, were united in a common purpose — a purpose which transcended race and background; a purpose which made them part of an extended family.

In his 11 years in the CFL, Johnson has experienced the same thing over and over again. He’ll tell you he still sees colour. He just sees it a lot differently.

“Look, let’s not kid ourselves, there’s politics in football,” Johnson said in the run-up to Sunday’s Grey Cup against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and, in all probability, his final CFL game. “But, in the end, you’re really judged by how you play.”

On the majority of the team’s defensive snaps, Johnson is the only white guy wearing the Leos’ orange and black. This year, he and his colleagues on the defensive line — all from the States, all black — went out to dinner once a week.

Defensive Line Night, they called it.

“We all seem to get along great,” Johnson says. “I don’t know what the magic formula is.”

But Keron Williams might.

“This is my third trip to the Grey Cup (he made two with Montreal) and the one thing I’ve learned is the relationships you build with your teammates is different than anything you experience in life,” says the Lions’ other defensive end. “Race isn’t a factor. The relationship merges into a brotherhood and it’s like family, especially on this team.

“That’s one thing that’s important in our locker-room and you see it in championship teams. You’ve got to be close to get to the top of the mountain.”

Now this team, this unlikely brotherhood, is one step away from planting its flag at the top of that mountain.

Football, of course, isn’t a pie-in-the-sky utopia where the Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream came true. It is a game played by men, imperfect men. Their world is not perfect.

But this is also true. The game, for the most part, is a meritocracy where players are judged by their contributions to the bottom line. More than any other sport, it’s also dependent on the 12 men on the field acting and reacting with a single purpose.

Those are powerful forces. They’re powerful enough, in fact, to break down the barriers which trouble us all so mightily.

“To get respect in the locker-room, you have to produce on the field,” says Lions head coach and GM Wally Buono. “Then race issue isn’t an issue.”

Buono would know. He emigrated to Canada from Italy as a boy, endured a difficult childhood and found his way to the game as first a player, then a coach. In Calgary, he encountered Roy Shivers, who was raised in Oakland in the ’60s, a time when his circle included several of the founding members of the Black Panthers.

The two men have been friends ever since and Shivers is now the Lions’ director of player personnel.

“Roy’s been to all the family weddings,” Buono says. “He helped my son drink his first bottle of champagne, which didn’t go over very well with my wife.”

At 70, Shivers also wears his hair in dreadlocks. Buono does not. But two decades after they first joined forces in Calgary, they’re still together and they’re still motivated by the same thing.

Then again, so are the rest of the Lions, whether they’re from Winnipeg (running back Andrew Harris), North Vancouver (guard Dean Valli); Kinshasa in the Congo (backup safety Cauchy Muamba) or Boynton Beach, Florida, (defensive back Korey Banks).

“It’s been the same ever since I started playing football,” says cornerback Dante Marsh, who’s also from Oakland. “Whether you’re black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Filipino, Samoan, whatever, it doesn’t matter. You can put all those things aside and say, for this moment, for these few months, we’re brothers and we want the same thing.

“I think football out of all the sports gives you that. When you’re 0-5 out of the gate like we were and you’re able to turn your season around and accomplish what you set out to accomplish, man, that’s awesome.”

It’s also one of those things that tells you sports are about something more important than wins and losses.

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